Will ‘Makers’ Help Chip Guys’ Bottom Line?

Are you seeing this newborn love among "makers," board vendors, and chip companies? What mystifies me is not so much the love part, but how anyone could eventually mistake this infatuation for good business.

MADISON, Wis. — Am I the only one scratching my head over this newborn love among “makers,” board vendors, and chip companies? What mystifies me most is not so much the love part, but how anyone could eventually mistake this infatuation for good business.

OK, there are a few random facts I’ve picked up in the past few months. First, chip suppliers today are going out of their way to help out non-engineering professionals in pursuit of DIY projects, or those who say they are.

To cater to this crowd, it isn’t enough just to give them traditional reference design. Freescale Semiconductor, for one, hopes to mine the crowd, despite an absence of hardware design expertise. It possesses some specific domain knowledge that might project it as the source of the next hot wearable device.

Freescale earlier this year launched a new reference design called WaRP. Freescale is adding to its platform a broad range of wearable building blocks (sensors, software, connectivity, etc.) from which makers can pick and choose what they need to scale up or scale down the device.

Marvell recently announced Kinoma Create. In pursuit of Web designers, software developers, and non-engineering professionals with no prior experience in designing a system, Marvell designed Kinoma Create, a JavaScript-powered maker kit for prototyping consumer electronics and IoT devices. Peter Hoddie, Marvell’s Kinoma vice president, described the kit as “much more complete than what a single-board computer can offer.”

It comes with "a case to make it portable, a battery to make it mobile, adjustable legs to reorient it, and an integrated breadboard for adding sensors -- no soldering iron needed," he said. But the beauty part (they say) is that users can integrate all the necessary elements with the higher-level JavaScript software.

Allwinner in China seemed delighted when pcDuino picked Allwinner’s apps processor as the brain for its motherboard. All the hard work needed to make a variety of Arduino hardware -- developed by the open-source hardware community -- pluggable to pcDuino has been carried out by the pcDuino community, not Allwinner. pcDuino, with no help from Allwinner, is enabling makers to design everything from a new smoke detector (which sends a message to your smartphone to change batteries, instead of making annoying beeping sounds in the middle of the night) to virtual desktops.

Below $100Next: Companies are putting out reference design-turned single computer boards at a price point around $100. At a time when you can get a Raspberry Pi, a credit card-sized board with a Broadcom SoC running Linux at only $35, even $100 seems pretty expensive to some makers.

A startup, Adapteva, last year launched a parallel-processing board called Parallella using a Kickstarter campaign. The company recently started building 1,400 boards a week and began “shipping mass quantities to Kickstarter backers, many of whom have waited almost 18 months.” The Parallella board is priced… well, you guessed it… at $99.

Similarly, Marvell last month launched Kinoma Create at Indiegogo, another crowd-funding site. Now the Kinoma Create, scheduled to start shipping in September, is priced at $149.

As Andreas Olofsson, Adapteva’s CEO, told us, “Apparently, nobody any longer buys a $1,500 reference design from a chip company.” As discouraging as all this sounds, the new “maker” movement opens opportunities for chip vendors to move devices and reference designs into the hands of people they’ve never sold chips to before. “If it is under $100, even a professional engineer could use his personal credit card to try out a new chip in his spare time over the weekend,” he explained. That’s not bad for Adapteva, which is hoping to sway engineers to try out the company's low-power multicore microprocessor design.

Yes it is quite practical to have chips and evaluation board's cost below $100 so that engineers can buy it themselves instead of waiting for long process in corporates to get the funds approved. Have seen the frustration of engineers due to delay in funds approval.

Long before the Maker movement became popular, I was a PR manager at Signetics. Many engineers and tech editors happily recounted stories of receiving free 555 timer samples from the company for use in school projects or garage experiments. These giveaways helped make the 555 one of most popular devices of all time.

Even though, Signetics was not an epic success like Intel, it did help educate generations of engineers and find millions of homes for the venerable timer. The moral of the 555 story is that looking at the immediate bottom line is not the only way to evaluate the love fest between makers and chipsters.

I wonder if today, instead of making all the money in 1M units/year chips ,some ic companies make a larger part of their money in 50-100kunits/year sales, since more things are sold at that levels and at those levels companies care more about time to market and less about every cent. If this is true and growing,it's another reason for the maker strategy to make sense.

Also, since the iphone,a higher level of product design is required, which calls for using experienced product designers(not just makers), their tools(arduino, javascript and tools they learn at the weekend) and many prototypes . An such tools might even make sense in production as a way to rapidly respond to a changing market, with relatively small cost increase.

@susan.rambo: That's a good way to describe it. Also getting product out to makers is like advertising/marketing -- hopefully one of those makers will be an influential engineer

Engineers tend to use parts with which they are familiar. If a prototype is developed on particular hardware, that hardware will be the default for going to production. As long as the chip vendors can minimize the support costs for a lot of startups by handing them off to groups of enthusiasts it's hard to see this as a worse gamble than creating reference designs.

If nothing else it creates a way for them to get deeper into retail channels. These maker components are showing up on the shelves at Fry's, which makes them much more accessible than having to go through the distributers.

When I talked to a Marvell engineer at EE Live! last month, I asked him what his company is planning to do between now (they were about to close the Indiegogo thing) and September (when they actually start shipping Kinoma Create).

IMO the key to success in selling lots of chips to lots of customers is excellent documentation. Some companies have the philosophy that "documentation is expensive" and write terrible, insufficient documentation, so even if the technology is excellent underneath you'll need so much tech support to use it that the vendor can only support a few large customers. Meanwhile, your competitor can put excellent documentation out on the Internet, for free, and as if by magic the they will sell oodles of chips -- a few at a time to each customer, at least initially -- but those individual chips add up. JMO/YMMV

As someone who loves to work and play with technology, my chief frustration is insufficient documentation so I am unable to do what I want with the chips. There are far more parts out there than I or any engineer can possibly evaluate, so if I start running into roadblocks it's often much easier to switch to a different part than to try to overcome the roadblocks. If there's sufficient open documentation, I can figure out what's going on myself and share that knowledge with others at the appropriate forum.

@joe.raffa. Thanks for your comment. Yes, "spray and pray" seems to be exactly where this seems to be going. The question is then how best to cast a wider net.

I heard from a chip executive I was interviewing in Beijing last month...as soon as he posted a reference design (of his new chip for wearables) on WeChat (China's widely popular messaging board), he received a ton of request for people wanting that board.

It tells us that 'makers' -- no matter where they are located -- are hungry and the social media definitely helps.